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The Ethics of the Face to Face Encounter: Schroeder, Levinas, and the GlanceAuthor(s): EDWARD S. CASEYSource: The Pluralist, Vol. 1, No. 1 (SPRING 2006), pp. 74-97Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Society for the Advancement ofAmerican PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20708851 .

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The Ethics of the Face to Face Encounter:

Schroeder, L?vinas, and the Glance

EDWARD S. CASEY

Stony Brook University

[.'absolument autre, c'est i'autrui.

?Emmanuel L?vinas, Totalit? et infini

The world is not so profane as to refuse admission to the

Infinite; but then, neither is it sacred enough to contain the Absolute in its totality. ?Brian Schroeder, Altared Ground

Introduction

Altared Ground: L?vinas, History, and Violence appeared in 1996, and I am

pleased to draw attention to this extraordinary text a decade later. I shall ap

proach it as much by indirection?by allusion and citation?as close reading; but this does not mean that I am any less prone to pay homage to it. On

the contrary: it is by linking this text to certain texts by L?vinas and to some

current concerns of my own that I will honor it.

Let me say a few words by way of introduction about Altared Ground

itself. It is a rare and timely contribution: rare, because it is the only text in

English (or any language I know of) that explicitly poses questions of his

tory and violence in the aftermath of L?vinas; timely, because these same

questions are so pressing today, in the wake not just of Levinas's work but of

deconstruction and postmodernism more generally. What is violence? What

forms does it take? To whom is it done? How is it related to historical events,

not only major ones such as the Holocaust or Vietnam or Iraq but to many

ongoing daily events, the humiliations and slights that so many must submit

to for most of their lives? What is the relation of such undeniable historical

violence, such as war, to ethics: that is, to what should happen to justice and

goodness? These are questions taken up lucidly and pursued insightfully in Altared Ground.

This singular book puts a number of leading figures in philosophy into conversation with each other?and with the author himself, who manages

the pluralist Volume 1, Number 1 Spring 2006 : pp. 74-97 ?2006 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

74



casey : The Face to Face Encounter 75

skillfully to create a true theatricum philosophicum in which complex ideas come alive and enter into intense dialogue. Two chapters are devoted to Plato,

especially to his concepts of imagination and of "the good beyond being." Hegel receives sustained treatment in four chapters in which mediation, ab solute knowledge, and the contrast between drive and infinity are discussed

with both accuracy and flair. Heidegger's thinking about unconcealedness, fundamental ontology, nothingness, and letting be are given incisive treat

ments. Throughout, Derrida and Nietzsche figure as serious kibitzers, with

Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Gadamer, and Deleuze and Guattari speaking from the sidelines.

Among the primary issues at stake in this groundbreaking book are the nature of ethical space (especially as it is configured in the face to face rela

tion); the rethinking of ethics entailed by such space; the character of violence

(particularly the violence that stems from a certain characteristic Western

conceptuality); the role of the Other in relation to oneself; a new sense of

infinity; the inculcation of justice; the place of religion after Nietzsche and L?vinas and Altizer (hence the "altar" in Altared Ground)-, and, above all, the fate of the idea of ground itself as it is related to a new sense of subjectiv ity in the postmodern (Schroeder prefers to say "postmetaphysical") era. As Schroeder proclaims at the beginning of the text:

What is proposed is an interrogation into the relation between the philo sophical concepts of ground {Gr?net), subjectivity, and violence. . . .

Specifically what is at issue is the relation between infinity and alter

ity, the determination of the origin of ethics, and thus the possibility of a non-totalizing ground the ethical (intersubjective) relation that

preserves the autonomy of the subject, the principal legacy of the Enlight enment. (i)1

And, indeed, in every chapter of this challenging book, the tension between the irreplaceable but problematized human subject and the equally prob lematic ground provided by the human other is laid bare and probed. For this reason, I have decided to focus on that relation between self and other,

which is the seat of ethical life: the face to face relation that is the unique and

indispensable scene of such life, its proper/improper territory, there where the ethical emerges and is realized.

Altared Ground is an extended meditation on the ground of ethics and

(by implication and sometimes expressly) politics. Refusing the monolithic ground of reason found in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics or in Kant's aptly entitled "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals," Schroeder navigates



76 THE PLURALIST I : I 20 6

through the virtual Sargasso Sea of confusion that has all but scuttled previ ous ethical thought in the West. In an ingeniously named series of chapters that range from ForeGround to BackGround, UnderGround to IdeoGround,

MystiGround to TransGround, and DiaGround to HyperGround, Schroeder

demonstrates, by the very hypertrophy of groundings entailed by the ethical

relation, that there is no single Ground of ethics, least of all a rational ground that can claim complete conceptual coherence. But he does not leave us in an

endless eddy either: by the end of the book, we are on the high and open seas

of chastened and clarified thinking about the things that matter?war and

violence, the good and the just, self and other, person and God, eschatology and apocalypse. These topics give ground (in both senses of this ambiguous

expression) to a vision of postmetaphysical courage and rigor, a vision in

which philosophy finds renewed inspiration beyond deconstructionist dis

solutions and postmodern disillusions.

Taking it in at a Glance

When I see someone in distress?in pain or suffering of any kind, mental as

well as physical?I feel instantly obliged. Obliged, first of all, to take notice,

and obliged as well to take action if this is pertinent or helpful. How much of

ethical life pivots on this pristine perception of distress is rarely discussed by ethicists, who tend to regard it as a merely preliminary moment, a prelude to

proper action, something that precedes principled conduct: a matter of mere

"apprehension" and not to be confused with the "comprehension" that being an ethical person entails.2 The (at least) implicit argument?an argument that

has sedimented itself in much of our commonsensical thought about being ethical?is that it is one thing to observe a situation of distress, but quite another thing to think about it, much less to act on it. We presume that the

real action resides elsewhere: e.g., in consideration of principles, memory of

past actions, and in the future action that is being called forth.

And yet I would like to claim that this supposedly minor moment con

tains, either actually or by adumbration, the entirety of the ethical phenom enon. It is a moment of "the world of pure experience" in William James s

term, and as such holds within itself potentially the whole of ethical life. The first moment is already the subsequent moment; apprehension is already

comprehension; perception is reflection and not some dumb beginning: "in

my beginning is my end."

And I want to take a further step and argue that this first moment is itself

condensed into a quite singular activity, that of ?ve glance, which despite its ap




paren tly exiguous character is capable of bearing ethical matters on its slender

shoulders. After all, we do take in the world at a glance, as we know whenever we let our look flit across the surfaces of things in order to gain a sweeping, if

altogether momentary, view of them. The glance is closely affiliated with what

both Kierkegaard and Heidegger call "the moment of vision," the Augenblick, wherein Blick means "look" or "glance." It is also closely related to what Husserl

calls the "source point" and James the "saddle back" of the present. All four

thinkers conjoin in regarding the present moment as nonpunctiform, as open and extended, as capable of conveying content of undelimited expansiveness. It is as if the very concentration, the focus, provided by the present moment

allowed it to be the purveyor of all that we experience. As this moment is the Archimedian point of our temporal experience,

so the glance is the fulcrum of ethical life. It is as if its very meagerness, its

status as a mere "peri-phenomenon," is its very advantage. For it is in merely

glancing that we take in the ethical equivalent of what Dewey would call "the

problematic situation." We do this so frequently and so unselfconsciously that we rarely pause to consider its larger significance.

Glancing Differently

If you are as skeptical as I imagine you may be regarding what I have said so

far, consider a few cases in point. I encounter a woman on a plane that is flying between Chengdu, China, and Lhasa, Tibet. She is in an advanced state of a crippling disease, perhaps multiple sclerosis. Her twisted body moves only with great difficulty, but she insists on moving herself. She walks down the

aisle, resting heavily on a cane at each step. Her glance engages mine, and in

that brief moment (which I have never forgotten) I perceive her distress: her

need for support from others, yet her proud defiance of this same support as long as she can walk on her own. In this case, there is nothing I can do

except look back sympathetically and realize that I have been put on ethical

notice: I have grasped human frailty and mortality, mine as well as my fellow

passengers, and I have been reminded of the fact that, at some point in life, each of us will require the concrete assistance of others.

Or take a less melodramatic case, that of happening upon two colleagues in heated dispute. One sees at a glance?one knows at a glance?that they are

re-enacting an ancient quarrel. Here, my own intervention is indeed called

for, and I try to intercede (in my capacity as friend as well as chairman of my

department) in order to alleviate the acrimony. I point out the unsuspected common ground they share, and how they are not nearly as antithetical to




each other as they take themselves to be. My action follows forthwith from

my initial glance at their locked-in conflict; no separate act of reflection is

required, since I am already reflective from the start: I understandthe dispute even as I come upon it unbidden.

But what of situations not known in advance, ones that do not have a

familiar history? Here, too, the glance is often definitive. Once, in Chicago, I

heard cries from the other side of the street; glancing over, I saw a man beating up a woman, holding her against a car with one hand as he pummeled her

with the other. I knew, at a glance, that this was not a mugging but a lover s

quarrel: something about the intensity of the interaction betokened this. And

I also knew what I had to do, without any time to ponder the circumstance: cross the street, walk directly toward the couple, yet without threatening to

do anything in particular. I was banking on the embarrassment of the other

in merely being perceived in his violent behavior, which is exactly what hap

pened. He glimpsed me coming toward him and his girlfriend, and then he

stopped hitting her, walking away abruptly. This was not heroism on my

part; it was an instinctive sense that any interference, even just approaching without saying a word or lifting an arm, would effectively undermine the

basic action.

Of course, glances dont always work to constructive effect. They can be

quite damaging: as we realize every time we are the object of an insulting or

supercilious look. A great deal of social life, much more than we usually ex

pect, arises from glances being exchanged, often in hurtful ways. Whenever we "size up" someone as possessing inferior character or breeding, as "not

worth our time," we are contributing to social malaise by disaggregating the

body politic. In this case, the glance does not so much reveal what needs to

be done from an ethical perspective (as in the incident on the Chicago streets) as it is the doing itself. Instead of being acutely percipient, it has become a

form of action. And it can be both at once, as occurs when a glance takes in

a scene while itself altering that scene by its very surveillance.

A last variation occurs when the glance is used to detect what is happening but itself goes undetected. A friend of mine described this situation recently by

recounting that she and a woman friend were both having dinner with a man

("George") who had formerly dated the friend ("Carol") but was now seeing her ("Martha") but on the sly, since neither wanted to hurt Carols feelings. Nevertheless, George was attending to her, Martha, in an intense way at the

dinner; and Martha stole a glance at Carol at one point to see if Carol was

upset over the extra attention given her by George. In fact, Carol was visibly

unhappy?so much so that later, after George had left, Carol lit into Martha




for having let him approach her so warmly at dinner. Thanks to her glance, Martha had anticipated this attack and was prepared for it. In this case, the

glance was interpersonally informative, helped to ameliorate a later develop ment that would have turned out much worse had she not been forewarned

of her friend s unhappiness. A single glance, one that was itself unreturned, took in a complex social dynamic and played an integral role in the eventual

resolution of an inherently conflictual situation. It is my contention that this

and other variations happen more often than we may imagine.

Getting to the Other

Even given such instances?and doubtless many others, as we can detect in

reading novels by Henry James or Marcel Proust, in which an entire dialectic

of glancing is often at play?we might still wonder about the source of the

ethical force of the glance. How could such a diminutive act have so much to

do with what is, arguably, the heaviest, most burdened part of our lives?that

is, the realm of ethical commitments and obligations? I would suggest that

it is because the glance is an intrinsic part of the face to face encounter with

others that it possesses such enormous ethical import. But this indicates that we must first grasp what it is about the face to face encounter that makes it

so ethically significant.

Only in the face to face encounter, insists L?vinas, do we experience hu man others (autrui) in their true exteriority, their absolute alterity. All other

ways of encountering others reduces them to forms of being that are subject to appropriation and domination by ontological categories?categories that at once comprehend and totalize these others. Instead of grasping others as

otherwise-than-being?that is to say, in their goodness (for the Good is, once

more, "beyond Being" in the Platonic phrase relished by L?vinas)?we con

strue them in terms of stratified and neutralized concepts that fail to capture what is most arrestingly specific about them: their ethical claim on us. This

claim is not conveyed by concepts such as "the Kingdom of Ends" or "enlight ened self-interest" or "the greatest good for the greatest number"?all of which

are only designations of planiform probability, projections of what certain

philosophers or politicians wish to be the case for all human beings?but by the actual encounter with other human beings in their intrinsic destitution.

Only in such an encounter do we suspend the universalizing tendency to

think of others in terms of what L?vinas calls "the imperialism of the Same"3

(i.e., as just another version of ourselves?our race, gender, nation, language, mores) and apprehend these others as radically other: as not assimilable (or



8o THE PLURALIST I : I 20 6

not assimilable only) to the leveled-down categories of history, sociology,

psychology, and of previous ethical theories themselves. We come up against the others as deeply disparate from ourselves, as metaphysically different, as

the Different itself. Regarding these others, no description or inclusion in

generic terms is possible; if such description or inclusion is attempted, it is

tantamount to misrepresentation and is the very basis of injustice and war.

These latter represent the inevitable outcome of regimenting the other

into ontological terms that always fail to fit the particular other with whom I

am confronted in a given circumstance?terms such as "white male intellec

tual," "Marxist female," "migrant laborers," etc. True as these are historically

(and essential as it may be to use them for strategic political purposes), they miss utterly the specificity of the encounter with what Kierkegaard called,

prophetically, "that individual." To do justice to the thatness?which is to

do justice, period, for L?vinas?I must own up to something at once prior and particular. This is the others face (visage).

Ethics, then, resides in the face to face encounter, in its unguarded open ness and transparency, in its abrupt actuality. For only then and there do I

find the other as Other, as existing in separation from me even as we share

the fact and fate of being members of the same species. Facing the Other

is thus a facing up to the Others transcendence, to his or her refusal to

be drawn into the web of the Same, to be alter to every ego. As Schroeder

shows so illuminatingly in Altared Ground, this face to face encounter is not

to be confused with the anxious engagement with ones own nothingness, one s uncanny lack of ultimate foundation, ones thrownness into the world

(92-94). In particular, this engagement possesses a facelessness that precludes an ethical relation: "What does it mean to say," asks Schroeder, "that one is

able to have a face to face 'relationship with that which does not have a face

([i.e., the] nothing)?" (98). Schroeder puts "relationship" into scare quotes in

order to indicate that there is no genuine relation here: as Sartre might put

it, one is one s own nothingness (this is precisely why one is so anguished over it), whereas a relation is between distinguishable items, however closely connected they may be. As L?vinas says himself: relationship "implies terms,

substantives. It takes them to be coordinated, but also independent" (cited in Schroeder 99). This is just what happens in the face to face encounter: I

and the Other are independent of each other, metaphysically "separate," yet we are intensely engaged at this very moment. "The same and the other at

the same time maintain themselves in relationship and absolve themselves of

this relation, remain absolutely separated" (L?vinas, Totality 102).4 In other

words, L?vinas wants to have it both ways, not because it is easier or repre




sents some sort of compromise (just the opposite!), but because this is the

very character of the ethical relation itself. As Schroeder aptly puts it: "Ethics, the welcoming of the Other by the self, is only accomplished through the

recognition and maintenance of the radical disjunction of same and other, of subject and object" (97).

Anxiety over ones uncanny thrownness into the world is therefore not

at stake when I encounter the Other face to face on his or her own terms.

Instead of being an occasion for realizing my freedom (as both Heidegger and Sartre would claim) and thus for personal empowerment, this encoun

ter puts me in debt to the Other and makes me realize my responsibility for that Other. In short, I am placed in an essentially "apologetic" position in which I must make amends to the Other, tacitly if not explicitly, for not

having done more to help that other. It is a circumstance of "the asymme

try of proximity," as L?vinas comes to call it in Otherwise than Being (158). Neither freedom nor equality?nor, for that matter, fraternity?is at stake as I encounter the other face to face. For then I am brought up against the

Other not as a partner, a copain (i.e., a chum or pal of equal standing), but as incommensurable, as towering over me, as absolute in his or her "height." This Other is unique and does not submit to the generalities and platitudes of collectivities; instead of consolidating itself into something conceptually or historically coherent, it is radically heterogeneous?not just to me but to

other Others as well. In Schroeder s words: "It is not the individual, the I, who in acknowledging her or his freedom renounces all systems or totalities

that impinge upon that radical freedom [i.e., as in Kierkegaard or Sartre]; it

is the Other (Tautrut) that refuses such systemization or totalization" (96). Let s note where we are. Our best guide remains Altared Ground, which

is unerring in its delineation of the perplexities as well as the strengths of

Levinas's take on the face to face relation. On the one hand, this relation

brings out in the subject, the self as witness of the Other, an acute sense of

obligation and justice, of desire as transcendence toward the Good, which is

revealed only in the face of the Other. Schroeder writes: "In its nudity and

defenselessness the face [of the Other] is an appeal for justice and a call to

responsibility for the sake of the Other. This obligation towards the Other is

the calling into question of the freedom of the selfsame, of rationality's claim

to comprehend the other" (96). The critique of freedom and rationality is

not made in the name of the autonomous subject but is based precisely in

the subject's heteronomy, its reliance on the Other to set the terms of the

ethical relation. This is to undo modernity at its own game of enfranchising the subject at the expense of the Other, whether this Other be the colonized




Other of extra-European origin; the Other gendered as Temale'; the Other as

mentally ill or retarded; in short, the Other in its "heterogeneous multiplicity" (to adapt a term Bergson applied to time). Now the Other is given not just

"respect" or "rights" or "recognition" but something much more powerful than these modernist concessions in the guise of universality, these forms of

cosmopolitanism. The Other is endowed with a Goodness that belongs only to the Other

as other, that can be desired only in the Other, not in oneself. The self, as "psy chism," is called to bear witness to the Other in its transcendent Goodness, and "separation [from the Other] is produced within the self as a psychism" (Schroeder 96); but ethics is not about the interest or prospering or perfect

ing of the self. It bears exclusively on the unmitigated obligation one has

to Others. On the other hand, and precisely from the position of abjection thus underlined by L?vinas, the prospect of a new tyranny emerges. To the

tyranny of neutrality, of conceptual comprehensiveness, of ontology?all of

which belong to the self, to the same?there is to be added the menace of a

different tyranny: that imposed by the Other to whom one is subject in the

ethical relation. With this Other, one has an asymmetrical and irreversible

relation: it makes the Other ones "master," a word L?vinas does not hesitate

to use in this context. Schroeder articulates the threat of this second tyranny in the form of two questions: "[D]oes the insistence on absolute separation, the maintenance of which is ethics, result in an ideology that ends in a tyr

anny of the other? What would prevent such an other from committing the

violence of coercion?" (97). These are exactly the right questions to ask of L?vinas, indeed of anyone

who makes the face to face relation the clue to ethical life. How are they to

be answered?

Overcoming Separation in a Glance

One way to answer the questions is to emphasize the factor of separation itself:

its very absoluteness means that the Other, however much he or she stands over me like a Colossus of sheer Difference, cannot absorb me entirely, can

not swallow me as I might fear, if I have what Sartre calls a "Jonah complex." This is the direction Brian Schroeder takes when he writes, "The notion of

distance or separation functions in a critical capacity for an understanding of freedom [i.e., as not wholly abrogated] and the constitution of subjectiv ity. One interprets the world only in distancing oneself from it" (97). One

protects oneself from the possible violence of the Other by recourse to the




paradox of asymmetrical proximity?namely, that one is apart in the very midst of the most intimate ethical bonding with the Other. The violence of

being incorporated by the Other is averted by the same means by which one

avoids doing violence to that Other: separation itself. Thanks to this meta

physical fact, one neither crushes the Other nor is crushed by this Other.

To be subject to the Other, and subjected precisely for one's ethicality, is not

(necessarily) to be the abject subject, the slave or prisoner, of that Other. One

can be subjected to otherness and yet not be its pawn. But there is a second way out, one that is enacted daily, so often indeed

that we rarely stop to notice it. This is the glance. Despite its diminutive

physiology and delimited scope, the glance effectively opposes the tyranny of the Other. It does so most dramatically in moments of defiance, as when

(in a passage from Faulkner's Light in August) Joe Christmas looks back at

those who have just castrated him, undoing their sadistic tyranny for one

poignant moment:

But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with his eyes open and empty of everything save consciousness, and with something, a shadow, about his mouth. For a long moment he looked up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his face,

body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. (407)

Sartre comments: "[T]his explosion of the Other's look in the world of the

sadist causes the meaning and goal of sadism to collapse. The sadist discovers that it was that freedom which he wished to enslave, and at the same time he

realizes the futility of his efforts" (382). But even short of such melodrama, the glance is an effective response

to the Other's tyranny. It intercedes to support the self from the killing

scrutiny of the Other, from being overwhelmed by the height and mastery

possessed by the Other.5 For all its unrehearsed and spontaneous character, it is a powerful form of resistance. It also acts as a force of collusion with the

Other in opposing, with that Other, a larger totality such as that of class or

state; hence, the telling phrase "conniving glances." Short of this, even just to "exchange meaningful glances"?another telling locution?is to alleviate

the pressure brought by the Other, including the pressure to be ethical at

all costs. The glance, as the gestural equivalent of the Augenblick, allows one

the momentary luxury of distancing oneself from such pressure. And, by its

very return action (every glance is at once a glance out and a glance back, a

two-beat action I have examined elsewhere6) a glance effects a retreat into the




sanctuary of the self: to the open-eyed, outward look with which it begins, it always adds, by way of necessary supplement, the closing of the look that

brings one back into the interiority of the psychism. In these various ways, whether through direct opposition, subtle collu

sion, or withdrawal into oneself, a glance, a mere glance, effects an extrication

from the Others tyranny. But there is an even stronger point to be made

regarding the antityranny of the glance (which can itself be quite imperious on occasion): its ingredience in the face to face relation itself. Ifit is by means

of this relation that the tyranny of the Other over oneself at once presents itself and is resolved (i.e., thanks to separation), and that tyrannizing of the

Other by oneself is also overcome (thanks to the r?barbative nudity of the

Others face, which refuses conceptualizing and ontologizing just as much

as it pleads "dont murder me!"), both of these vanquishings of tyranny are

facilitated?indeed, often outright implemented?by the glance. The glance, we might say, is the saving grace of the face to face relation and thus the very vehicle of ethical realization.

If we begin to think in this direction, we shall only rejoin Brian Schro eder once again. Although he does not focus on the glance per se, he makes one remark that is very suggestive in this context:

The neutrality of the third term, of thought that becomes the mode of identification by which the other is reduced to a moment of the same, is criticized [by L?vinas] as a light that illumines not a particular existent but all beings, bringing them into full presence, naked under the lidless

eye of Spirit or Being. (97)7

To be "naked under the lidless eye of Spirit or Being" is to be in a situa

tion in which glances have been altogether foreclosed. In the floodlight of

ontology, in the glaring light of its supposed neutrality, one cannot escape

by glancing?either by glancing out of the compound of comprehension in which one has been rigorously enclosed or by glancing back into oneself on the near side of the glare. Nor is the sphinx of "Spirit or Being" capable of glancing out or back either. For a look to be lidless is for it to lack the

capacity to glance, which requires not just the movement of the eye but its

closure or "cut." As Derrida says ? propos of the Augenblick: it is, literally, "blink of the instant":

Nonpresence and nonevidence are admitted into the blink of the instant. There is a duration to the blink, and it closes the eye. This alterity is in fact the condition for presence, presentation, and thus for Vorstellung in general. (65)8




To be without the blink is to be fixed in a stare: the everlasting stare of noetic

scrutiny, the steady stare of the scientist, the stare of the spirit of gravity as

epitomized in the vacant but relentless stare of the Egyptian sphinx. Moreover, Derrida here suggests that the blink, that close ally of the glance, is itself a

form of alterity, with every bit as much right as the alterity of the Levinasian

Other. For it brings the sling blade of nonpresence into the sloe-eyed openness of pure presence, being the condition of possibility for the latter. Just so, the

glance effects nonpresence by its backward beat and is equally the condition

of possibility for pure visibility, which it searches out and constitutes. The

glance, abetted by the blink, insinuates nonpresence and nonevidence into

the heart of the face to face relation, which, construed as "nudity" and "rev

elation," threatens to be itself a form of unexamined full presence.9 To make my case more completely than I can in this essay, I would have

to show how the blink and the wink, as well as the sly look (not to be con

fused with the petrifying regard o(Sartre's description), all contribute to the

glancing world in which the face to face relation is most richly realized. The

glance is not just an instrument or a part of such a relation; it extends it be

yond sheer staring confrontation into subtle variations. It is even the living medium in which this relation grows and prospers, feeling its own way and

finding its own truth.

Questioning the Face

But you may be wondering: why all the fuss over the face to face encounter,

including the glance? Is this so special, after all? Granting its importance for

concrete human interaction, is it really necessary for ethical life? Kant, for

one, would be quite skeptical of any such intimate arrangement as it bears on ethics. The actuality of human beings who are confronted with each other

in person is more apt to bring out their individual interests and empirical needs and desires. It certainly does not guarantee (nor does it necessarily foster) their ethical reality, which is independent of all such interests, needs, and desires. The only community that matters for ethics is a community of

noumenal beings, namely, the Kingdom of Ends, which is a gathering of

wholly spiritual entities who do not confront one another (nor do they glance at each other, so far as I know). Even the community at stake in aesthetic

judgment, the imputed group of like-minded judgers of art, is not in a face to face relation, since it includes all who might judge a given work of art. In

art as in ethics, the face to face encounter is replaced by ideal communities

of non-present beings.




Jacques Derrida, doubtless Levinas's most trenchant critic, rejoins Kant, otherwise a most unlikely ally, in being equally skeptical of the face to face as a basis of ethical action. In particular, the sheer presence entailed by the en

face relation is of dubious valence for Derrida, since it only serves to reinforce

the priority of presence that has been the bane of Western metaphysics since

Parmenides and Plato: "Le visage est pr?sence, ous?a (Derrida, "Violence and

Metaphysics" 149). L?vinas and Derrida join forces in their common critique of "ontology" as the ultimately totalizing enterprise in the West, even as they

part ways when it comes to the virtues of direct presence?nearness or prox

imity?as this figures into ethics. L?vinas s belated introduction of the trace,

which complicates presence even if it does not eliminate it, would seem to

bring him closer to Derrida; yet the face remains the bearer of the trace of

"illeity" for L?vinas: it is a trace of a higher presence or what Schroeder, who

compares Derrida and L?vinas at many reprises, would call "hyperground." For L?vinas, either the face is itself an ultimate form of presence or it presents the trace of another presence, that of God (who does not present His face).

Derrida would urge us to deconstruct both modes of presence. Other contemporaries of L?vinas are just as skeptical as Derrida of the

primacy of the face to face encounter. Merleau-Ponty, a proponent of the

"primacy of perception," maintains that "the other is never present face to

face" (cited in Schroeder 114). Merleau-Ponty s point is that the other need not

be present in this special revelatory mode, since I am already conjoined with

the other through sharing in the worlds flesh, both being figures in the same

scene: "myself and the other are like two nearly concentric circles which can

be distinguished only by a slight and mysterious slippage. . . [with the result

that] the mystery of the other is nothing but the mystery of myself" (cited in Schroeder 113-14). As Schroeder remarks, it follows that "the chiasmatic

self-Other relation is a reciprocal and reversible event for Merleau-Ponty"

(114). It is just such reciprocity and reversibility that L?vinas denies in the

face to face relation, a relation of "instruction" and not exchange?hence, a

relation in which one party must be in a position of "vigilant passivity to the

call of the other" (Schroeder 102).10 Still another take on the face to face relation is that of Deleuze and Guat

tari, who speak of "faciality" in A Thousand Phteaus. On their reading, the

face is a field of alterity and is not limited to what is grasped directly in the

immediate presence of the other. On the contrary, what is most important about the face is its correlation with the larger landscape in which it is set;

instead of bearing down on the face proper, Deleuze and Guattari recom

mend an escape from the face into the landscape within which it is set. Thus,




a face is not individual but a neutral location of social assemblages: "the face constructs the wall. . . the signifier needs ... to bounce off of" (Schroeder

126). In this way, the face signifies "something absolutely inhuman" (Schro eder 126). It is true, as Schroeder remarks, that L?vinas, along with Deleuze

and Guattari, rejects modernist conceptions of subjectivity; but it remains

the case that the latter thinkers want to put the face "on the road to the

asignifying and asubjective" (126), that is to say, to put us in a direction that

exceeds any particular face to face encounter. As with Derrida, the intense

intimacy of this encounter, its aura of privileged presence, is questioned; and

as with Merleau-Ponty, a more comprehensive field is charted out, a field

aptly designated by the term "landscape" on the part of Merleau-Ponty as

well as Deleuze and Guattari.

Glancing v. Looking

I cite these various figures from contemporary French thought to indicate

that they, like Kant before them, would question the exemplary character

of the face to face relation, proposing other paradigms for ethics (and poli tics) that exceed the confines of this relation. L?vinas is not left, however,

without resources in responding to these critiques. His tactic overall is to

insist that the face to face relation contains far more than appears on a first

consideration. Not only does it involve a complex asymmetry and elements

of mastery, passivity and height, but it also includes a linguistic component that fills out the relation and allows it to bear the full load of the ethical. For the face of the Other in the ethical relation is not mute: it is not a dumb

object, an inarticulate visage. From the very beginning it speaks; it not only looks back at me, it puts its thoughts into discourse: it is a talking face. Such

speech renders it articulate in its demand upon us, and, most important, it is

the basis for the dialogue whereby I can relate to it now and in the future. In

Schroeder's words, "The ethical self is desirous of the Other, not for the sake

of possession or dominance, but to formulate a dialogical relation. . . .The

absolute separation between the self and Other is ethically maintained in the

face to face relation that is the essence of speech, of discourse" (108). The point is not just that the face is an effective communicative vehicle,

as on certain expressive theories of language (for which other parts of the

body are also expressively pertinent); it is that the face that faces us in the

ethical relation comes already speaking, speaking before speech as it were.

Thus, Levinas's claim in Totality and Infinity: "Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse to words takes place already within the primordial




face to face of language" (206). Thus, too, his claim in Otherwise than Being that the face is the scene of the saying that precedes the said? a saying that

is at one with the face and enters into a "spiraling movement" (un movement

en vrille) with the said.11 As Schroeder specifies this situation, "antecedent to

[fully constituted] speech, to words in the order of the said, saying signifies in the distinct relationship of proximity" (112).

Such saying is at once enigmatic and epiphanous. It is enigmatic insofar as there is no simply statable message or thesis to be found in the saying of

the face. For intelligible meaning to emerge, the saying has to enter the realm

of the said; short of this, one experiences the expressivity of prediscursive

speech, in which the ethical imperative is contained, even if not in so many words. (When it is put into so many words, we have to do with the categorical

imperative and other fully formulated imperatives.) What Schroeder terms

"the enigmatic paradox" refers to this ambiguous status of saying in the face to face relation: we are summoned by the Other to be responsible for that

Other, even to sacrifice and substitute ourselves for him or her, and yet this

happens without the summons being put into well-formed sentences. In fact, the infinity of the Other is "betrayed" when this translation occurs, even if

this betrayal is (again in Schroeder's words) "necessary for the revelation of

the ethical imperative expressed in the face."12

The saying at stake here is epiphanous inasmuch as it escorts in the

revelation of the Other that is not to be confused with the disclosure of that

Other. "Disclosure" signifies the uncovering of a phenomenon, bringing it

into what Husserl liked to call "the brightly lit circle of pure presentation." It is part of the Western obsession with illuminational models of truth, an

obsession still to be found in Heidegger's endorsement of the "clearing"

(Lichtung) as the place in which the truth of Being is disclosed. But in rev

elation we witness a literal epi-phenomenon, an appearing beyond appear ance itself, something other than being. This is the infinity of the Other.

"The epiphany of the face," writes Schroeder, "is the breaking forth of the

Infinite into the finite order of history" (116). This means that the Infinite, or more exactly, the idea of the Infinite, breaks up the totalities of the finite

world of conceptual comprehension. In this breakup, in the epiphany of

the saying face, is to be found the essence of the ethical, which can never be

reduced to the phenomenal order of interest or utility, of goods or services, stated (said) commands or imperatives. The enigmatic paradox, restated to include the epiphanous face, is that "the infinite overflows the totality of

history and of thought and that the meaning of this surplus or plenitude is ethical" (125).13




In these two ways, then?by way of saying and of revelation?the face

to face relation shows itself to be the appropriate locus of the ethical: where

else, asks L?vinas, can the infinity of the Other, thus his or her Goodness (an infinite property), emerge? Certainly not in any group or tradition, which

level down Infinity to the finite and Goodness to a given good. How else

can it be made known except in the expressive face of this same Other, who

speaks to me of my responsibility (for example, in the basic imperative not

to murder him or her)? Certainly not in the apophantic utterances of clas

sical ethics, which tell us what we should finally be (typically in relation to some abstract ideal of being good) instead of how we should act in relation to a specific Other, whom we now encounter face to face. Ethics starts in this

encounter, and it also ends here: there is no larger playing field, not landscape, not society, not history, not ontology. Or, more exactly, there certainly are

such encompassing fields, but they are not the ones peculiarly pertinent to

the ethical. The playing field of ethics is here and now and always?in the

moment of encounter with the Other in destitution and distress, making a

call to us and a demand upon us.

It is my contention that in this delimited domain of the ethical, the

glance is an extremely important player, much more so in any case than has

been previously recognized by previous ethicists. This includes L?vinas, who

is strangely silent on the specific modalities of the face to face encounter and

who may have been motivated to overlook the significance of the glance in

the wake of the notoriety that came to accrue to the "look" as a result of

Sartre s celebrated description of it in Being and Nothingness. Nevertheless, the

petrifying power of le regard, exemplified by the Medusas head, is precisely the sense of vision L?vinas would link to the Western obsession with illumi

nation and comprehension?that is, the effort to bring things into the light of day where they can be scrutinized with neutrality and objectivity. Just this sense of seeing is antithetical to the ethical relation, wherein we are enjoined to grasp the Other in his or her fragility and distress (though also, and as a

function of this very need, as an uncompromisable obligation placed on us

to witness the Other). The glance is something else again from the look. Unlike the look, which

freezes intimacy or overlooks it altogether, the glance is well suited to the

close quarters of the face to face circumstance. It gains impressions and picks up nuances in an especially skillful way. It can increase intimacy itself, as

when welcoming and seductive glances are exchanged directly between two

parties; but even short of this, and apart from alienating glances, the glance can discern signs of distress of the very sort that are ethically relevant on the




Levinasian paradigm. Glancing at the way in which my friend has dressed

in a semideliberately unattractive way, I read right away the self-effacement

she is feeling at her current lot in life. The distress is worn on her sleeve

quite literally, and it only takes a glance to apprehend and comprehend it all

at once. In fact, it is this very "all at once" temporal structure of the glance that renders it so valuable for grasping the face to face situation in which I

so often find myself. Even if Heidegger is right?that anxiety arises from the

facelessness of one's own nothingness?the anxiety itself is seen all at once

on my other friend's face as I see him struggling to articulate his difficulty with certain colleagues in a philosophy department.

Perhaps most important is the factor of surprise, which is part of the

game of glancing. It is not that I always glance in order to be surprised; but

whenever I do glance, I find myself surprised to some significant degree

(Casey, "World" 13-37). A glance, we might say, is open to surprise and

has a special sensitivity for it. I take things in at a glance not to understand

things in their essence?this is better done by the never closing eye of social or natural Science, exhibiting the "overarching self-imposed sovereignty of

theorta (Schroeder 122)?but to follow out their incursions and immersions

in unexpected corners of the world. In short, there is a spontaneous alliance

between the glance and the face to face encounter, an alliance evident in the

internal connection between revelation and surprise. As Schroeder remarks in commenting on this connection, "Revelation [of the Other in the face to

face encounter] is always surprise, [something] non-thematizable and non

totalizable. . . .The non-violent rupture of the totality will be a moment of

surprise" (115,127).14 The glance delivers surprise by piercing the pretenses and

dissevering the defenses of the identities and unities, samenesses and egoities,

by which we compulsively hide ourselves and protect ourselves, from each

other and from ourselves. It has a specifically disruptive power that makes

it an efficacious, vanguard force in the critique of totality (and thus of war

and violence, which always attend totality) that is the ultimate aim of the

book entitled Totality and Infinity. What better agent of detotalizing than

the glance, which cuts through cant and convention alike?

The subtitle of Levinas's masterwork is "An Essay on Exteriority." Here as well, in the difficult realm of absolute separation, the glance is an active

ally. For I, this lonely psychism, am needed to grasp and maintain the alter

ity of the Other, to keep the Other other, exterior to my needs if not to my desire. As L?vinas puts it in Totality and Infinity, "it is in order that alterity be produced in being that a 'thought' is needed and an I is needed" (cited in

Schroeder 122).15 The relation to the Other comes irreversibly from myself




to that Other, and not the other way around: I respond to the Other as I

see that other in need and thus needing me. In effecting this response, the

glance is indispensable; cutting across personal and social space, not to men

tion prejudice and dogmatism, the glance reaches out to the needful alterity of the Other. L?vinas puts it this way:

A relation whose terms do not form a totality can hence be produced within the general economy of being only as proceeding from the I to the other, as a face to face, as delineating a distance in depth?that of conversation, of goodness, of Desire?irreducible to the distance

[which] the synthetic activity of the understanding establishes between the diverse terms, other with respect to one another, that lend themselves to its synoptic operation. (Schroeder 122)16

So, too, the glance proceeds from me to you, delineating a distance in the

depth of our relation, being irreducible to anything like a "synoptic gaze" (L?vinas, Totality 53).

In the chapter entitled "DiaGround" in his book Altared Ground, Brian

Schroeder asks: "What are the ways in which plurality and multiplicity,

namely, the face to face relations, keep getting co-opted by the unities of

things like persons?" (125) One answer is that the foreclosure of the glance, the failure to take in the Other with openness and surprise, and the suspen sion of the glance s spontaneous deconstruction of doxa and hexis, "belief"

and "habit"?with these cessations of the power of the glance, the unifying and totalizing of heterogeneous multiplicity become dominant. And yet, all it takes to reverse these seemingly ineluctable processes is a glance at, or toward, or with, an Other with whom we are in close proximity, face to

face. Then the production of what Sartre calls "detotalized totalities" arises,

undermining the ontosclerosis of institutions and personal relations Sartre

himself considers inevitable. All that has become all too solid dissolves?with a mere

glance.

As Schroeder says: "Even if it is the case that the face to face relation is

continually corrupted [insofar as] it is a relation within being and not exterior

to it, there is always a possible surprise assessed beyond the reconceptualiza tions of the Other" (127). Can it be that the most effective surprise is made

possible by the least obvious act? Does this demure act give surprising hope to an otherwise hopeless circumstance of neutralization and indifference?

Schroeder asks: "How can it be that hope is given, on the one hand, in the

slenderest and most distant projective terms, and on the other, experientially in

the most concrete and ordinary manner, namely, in the face to face relation?"




(127) How can hope be given, indeed, if not by the glance, that most slender

of projective acts, occurring as it does in "the most concrete and ordinary manner"? Is the true epiphany not that which is realized by the glance?

Leading Questions

You will doubtless be wondering whether I have doubly confined ethics, first

by agreeing with L?vinas that the face to face encounter is the very scene of

ethical conduct: the place where ethical dilemmas first arise and where, too,

they are resolved (if they ever are resolved). Following L?vinas, I am taking the face to face situation as the very seat of morality, the site of Sittlichkeit.

And I am proposing one further apparent confinement: that this scene of

the ethical occurs concretely and specifically in and through the glance, con

strued as the gestural basis of moral interaction, the bodily lingua franca of

ethical interchange. Beyond spontaneous speech as the expressive vehicle of

the Others demand upon me, there is a second form of expression, this one

altogether prediscursive yet not less effective and no less articulate in its own

way. Language is allied with theory, i.e., spectatorial viewing (a theoros is a

person who observes spectacles in nearby cities). Stopping short of propo sitional language, the glance has nothing of the studied look, the patient observation, so prized in Western theorizing, which prides itself on being

independent of practice, including ethical practice, as is already emphasized by Aristotle. The glance itself is altogether part of practice?so much so, so

immersed in it, that we rarely pause to notice its importance; and it is part of ethical practice in particular, again a much more important part than has

been previously recognized. The importance is found in its role as the con

veyor of ethical intentions, as the purveyor of ethical discourse, and as the

watchful surveyor of the ethical scene. By simply glancing at the other s face, we detect what he or she is about to do, both in terms of express aims or tacit

wishes; and by exchanging significant glances, we display our own intentions

in such a way as to engage the other before, or under, or through explicit verbal exchanges. The entire face to face encounter is tessellated with glances, tracked and traced by them. If the face to face encounter is as indispensable to ethics as L?vinas claims it is?and as Schroeder also assures us it is, here

allying himself with L?vinas versus skeptics such as Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Delueze and Guattari?then it behooves us to own up to the dense fabric

of glances from which it is composed and by which it is sustained.

The encounter in the agora, supposedly the scene of the most highly theo

retical endeavor, was also a scene in which glances were transmitted. People




were then face to face, often by chance (as Aristotle explicitly mentions in

his discussion of tuch? in his Physics), and spoke about matters of ethics and

politics. Yet this public space, paradigmatic for constructive discourse about

these matters (as emphasized by Hannah Arendt), was riven by glances as well as by words?the two together intertwined in ways that added depth and

subtlety to the encounter, giving flesh to the bones of abstract thinking. And

if it is true (as Derrida claims) that "all the classical thoughts interrogated by L?vinas are drawn toward the agora"17 so the face to face encounter always draws us toward a comparable scene of active engagement in which glancing is as crucial as speaking, the two together co-constituting the place where the

ethical happens. If this is so, my first question to Brian Schroeder would be this: does he

agree that the face to face encounter as set forth by L?vinas calls for supple mentation of the sort for which I have here been arguing? (Where I am using the concept of "supplement" in Derrida's own sense of being not just an ad

dition but something necessary to the very matter one is supplementing.) From here, I have a series of other questions to pose, which are directed

at once to Schroeder and to L?vinas:

. Does ethical obligation obtain toward the nonhuman realm (i.e., animals and trees and mountains)? This is a realm I know Schroeder is deeply concerned about, with his longstanding interest in envi ronmental matters. If the face to face is indeed the sine qua non of

ethical life, and if it is exclusively between human beings, how shall we regard our responsibility toward those we do not encounter face to face? (My own suspicion is that, precisely in the absence of dou

bly articulated language, the significance of glancing becomes only more heightened, particularly as concerns the world of animals and

perhaps the inanimate as well.) 2. Does ethical responsibility entail the renunciation of political power?

Schroeder cites L?vinas: "What is this original trace, this primordial desolation? It is the nakedness of a face that faces, expressing itself,

interrupting order [including political order]," then comments, "The ethical power or resistance that is conveyed through the face is para

doxically the absolute renunciation of power in the political (broadly construed) sense of domination of the Other" (116). Schroeder gives as a reason for this diremption between the ethical and the political the lack of mediation in the former: "There is no sense of media tion in ethical intersubjectivity, though there is [mediation] in all democratic political and legal relations" (121).18 Here I would only ask whether such an absolute difference between the ethical and the



THE PLURALIST I : I 20 6

political is really necessary, or is in fact the case. Certainly, if politics entails domination?if it is always the politics of The Prince?then one would hope that the ethical points in quite a different direc tion. But if it only calls for a more extensive mediation than does the ethical, one might hope that the ethical and the political were

ultimately conterminous and cooperative. Put otherwise: is not the

face to face already mediated to a significant degree such that it does not constitute an entirely closed domain? Does not the presence of speech therein already introduce mediation in the very midst of

desire and goodness? Indeed, does not the face itself (including its

glancing powers) import mediation in the form of history, as is im

plied in this statement from Altared Ground: "As a historical entity, the Other is present to consciousness via the face; but as the trace

of the transhistorical Infinite, of the absolutely other, the Other

conveys the invisible passivity of ethical obligation" (120).19 Here

mediation is brought into the face to face encounter, and yet, by the same stroke, excluded once again within that same encounter. Can

we have it both ways? We have just been brought to history, about which Schroeder poses a pointed question at the beginning of his book: "Does L?vinas s

conception of the absolutely other as the Other . . . not mean . . .

that every metaphysical category is totally abstract and non-actual

including, above all, the category of the infinite? [Such a question] indict[s] L?vinas of a certain, if not radical, a- or even non-historicity of thought" (18). Derrida, in "Violence et m?taphysique," is deeply worried about this, too: "It is evident that L?vinas thus describes his

tory as blindness to the other and laborious procession of the same.

One could ask oneself if history can be history, if there is a history, when negativity is confined to the circle of the same . . . [and] if

history itself does not commence with this relation to the other which L?vinas posits beyond history."20 My question here is closely related to my earlier concern with the problem of two tyrannies: If the same is indeed closed off from history (or the political), will it not only suffer from abstraction and seclusion (and thus ineffective

ness), but will it not also become despotic in its own domain? To be

without history is not only to be powerless in history; it is to garner,

surreptitiously, a spurious but dangerous power that is self-aggran dizing and self-fulfilling, that says, in effect, "whatever history may

judge to be the case, I know this to be right." Granting that histori cal judgment must always come after the fact?the historian is the

"survivor," as L?vinas says in Totality and Infinity (220-47)?does this mean that the face to face encounter is historyless? Does it not

have to contain?indeed, engender?history in some significant




sense if it is indeed the pivot of the ethical life? Is not this life a life in a concrete life-world, hence a world with its own history, albeit one quite different from national or world history of the sort about which L?vinas is justly suspicious? Recalling Derrida s claim that, for L?vinas, "the infinite passage through violence is called history" (Violence 130), I am moved to ask: is there not another sense of his

tory than that of violence?

4. Speaking of violence, I want to return to Schroeder a question he asks of L?vinas midway through Altared Ground: "But does L?vinas constitute a violence towards the very alterity he seeks to preserve in that he places the signification of otherness beyond history and therefore de-existentializes the suffering and oppression of the Other?

Does the opposition of ethics and history, of metaphysics and ontol

ogy, of infinity and totality, negate . . . ethical praxis itself?" (116) In

other words, has L?vinas s commitment to the face to face, which is

the situs of the first members of each of the dyads just mentioned,

estranged him permanently from a model of effective action in the world? Certainly so, if the face ? face is hermetically sealed from the uncomfortable intrusions of the world; certainly not, if it is not so

sealed but brings those intrusions into the purview of the same. That the latter is the case is suggested by the fact that L?vinas starts from the undeniable facticity of suffering and distress?from destitution? as the first moment of the ethical. But are the later moments?those of the demand for justice, the invocation of goodness, the call to

substitute oneself for the other?shielded from the harsh realities of

history and politics? Do they signify retreat into what Derrida calls

(with a slightly different inflection) "a pure non-violence"21?

5. Finally, and to come full cycle in these remarks, we need to return to

the question of ground. How shall we, how can we, use this term after

Heidegger and Derrida have so thoroughly deconstructed it? Does L?vinas allow us to hazard it again, this time on a different basis? Such would seem to be at least a tacit claim throughout Altared Ground, a

title whose punning character is here especially pertinent. Is the face to face a groundless ground for ethics?for ethics to begin again, or

rather to recover the abyssal ground on which it has always stood?

Twice, at least, Schroeder points in this direction: once, when he

speaks of an "an-archic past"?that is, "revealed as the non-grounding ground of ethical signification" (123). This is the past that is revealed

by the trace belonging to the face: the past that was never a present, thus never a ground for its present recollection. Then, when he states

that "the enigmatic ground' of the ethical relationship, of meaning itself, is paradoxically, the absence of all grounds" (147), the scare

quotes associated with the first use of "ground" in this sentence are




telling: the word is affirmed, yet also retracted, in one and the same

typographical gesture. This would suggest that every time we look into the source of ground, what grounds ground itself, we find an

abyss (as Derrida would say) or the uncanny (as Heidegger would

put it). That is one way in which ground is altered/altared, changed/ honored. But there is another way, one suggested by the chapter titles of Altared Ground, which proliferate grounds: BackGround, IdeoGround, WarGround, TransGround, MiddleGround, and the like. Here, ground is ungrounded differently: by a sheer proliferation of grounding terms, showing that ground itself is no single thing, as

if to say that ground is not so much abyssal or uncanny as it is self

engendering, giving rise to a heterogeneous multiplicity that defies

ontological closure and unification. This way lies the smooth space of A Thousand Plateaus, with its rhizomatic root system: another

degrounded ground.

By the end of the elegant and extraordinary text Altared Ground, we are

left wondering: which way are we to go?into the pit or into the rhizome, and will we be able to take L?vinas with us? Where does the face to face en

counter take us, after all? Who can say, just glancing at it? Or will the glance take us out of the pit and beyond the rootstalk into the plant that exfoliates

above the ground, in the HelioSpace and HyperPlace that characterize the

face to face encounter and its ethical bearing?

NOTES

. Italics in the original. 2. On apprehension vs. comprehension in its originally Hegelian acceptation, see Hegel

sect. 90. The ethical implications of this distinction are sketched in Schroeder 12.

3. L?vinas writes, "The metaphysical other is other with an alterity that is not formal,

is not the simple reverse of identity, and is not formed out of resistance to the same, but is prior to every initiative, to all imperialism of the same" (Totality 38-39).

4. Italics in the original. With his usual acumen, Schroeder spells out this same paradox by simultaneously affirming "both the concrete personal nature of the face to face and the absolute distance or separation that remains between the self and Other" (96; italics in the original).

5. L?vinas writes: "Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power. It issues from the State and in the non-violence of the totality without securing itself against the violence from which this non-violence lives, and which appears in the tyranny of the State" (Totality 46, cited in Schroeder 97).

6. Compare with Casey 46-73.

7. Italics added. 8. "Blink of the instant" is in italics in the original. 9. It was perhaps in recognition of the danger of construing the face to face relation as



casey : 77?^ Face to Face Encounter 97

a matter of pure presence that L?vinas introduced the idea of "trace" into its constitution

shortly after the publication of Totality and Infinity-, compare with L?vinas "Trace." io. This is L?vinas s phrase. l?. On this spiraling movement, see L?vinas Otherwise 44. 12. Italics in the original. Schroeder speaks of "enigmatic paradox" (112).

13. Italics in the original. 14. Schroeder speaks of "the surprise of exteriority which paradoxically arises from the

interiority that the face signifies at the trace of the Infinite" (13). Italics in the original. 15. Italics in the original. 16. Italics in the original. 17. Derrida 145: "Toutes les pens?es classiques interrog?es par L?vinas sont ainsi tra?n?es

vers Xagorai 18. Italics in the original. Schroeder also remarks: "There appears to be an internal

contradiction between the affirmation of ethical transcendence and the refusal of histori cal mediation. The Other is not only refractory to categorization by thought; the Other is also 'flesh', to borrow Merleau-Ponty s term. Does the denial of mediation as a path to the 'royal road of ethics' [Derrida] render the problems of injustice, suffering, and murder meaningless?" (117)

19. Italics in the original. 20. Italics in the original. 21. "Violence" 146-7: "Pure violence, a relationship between beings without faces, is

not yet violence, is pure nonviolence. And inversely: pure nonviolence, the nonrelation of the same to the other (in the sense understood by L?vinas) is pure violence. Only a face can arrest violence, but can do so, in the first place, only because a face can provoke it."

REFERENCES

Casey, Edward. "The Time of the Glance." Becomings. Ed. Elizabeth Grosz. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 2000. 46-73.

-. "World at a Glance." Chiasms. Ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor. Albany: SUNY , 1999.13-37

Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena. Trans. D. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern

UP, 1973? -. "Violence and Metaphysics." Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago:

U of Chicago P, 1978. Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Mod. Lib., 1959. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. L?vinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Nijhof, 1978.

-. Otherwise than Being. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Nijhof, 1981. -. Totality and Infinity. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969. -. "The Trace of the Other." 1964. Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. A. Lingis.

The Hague: Nijhof, 1987. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Trans.

H. Barnes. New York: Citadel P, 1964. Schroeder, Brian. Altared Ground: L?vinas, History, and Violence. New York: Roudedge,

1996.



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